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QUAKER HILL 
SERIES 



VI. H tenable Gbeors of 
Biblical Inspiration 



BY 



PROF. IRVING FRANCIS WOOD. 



The Quaker Hill Conference is held an- 
nually, the first week in September, at 
Quaker Hill, Dutchess County. N. Y. It is 
a gathering for the promotion of Bible 
study, for the discussion of vital problems 
of the present day and for the quickening 
of the spiritual life. 



A Tenable Theory of 
Biblical Inspiration. 



AN ADDRESS 



BY 



IRVING FRANCIS WOOD. 

PROFESSOR OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE AND 
COMPARATIVE RELIGION, SMITH COLLEGE, 
NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS. 



READ AT THE FOURTH ANNUAL MEETING OP THE 

QUAKER HILL CONFERENCE, SEPTEMBER THE 

SIXTH, NINETEEN HUNDRED AND TWO. 



Published by the Quaker Hill Conference Association 

Quaker Hill, New York 

1902 



Publications. yv 






Of the Quaker Hill Conference Association 



A Critical Study of the Bibie, by Rev. 
Newton M. Hall of Springfield, Mass. 

The Relation of the Church at Home 
to the Church Abroad, by Rev. George 
William Knox, D. D., of New York. 

A Tenable Theory of Biblical In- 
spiration, by Irving Francis Wood of North- 
ampton, Mass. 

LOCAL HISTORY SERIES. 

David Irish— A Memoir, by his daughter, 
Mrs. Phoebe T. Wanzer of Quaker Hill, N.Y. 

Quaker Hill in the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury, by Rev. Warren H. Wilson of Brooklyn, 
New York, 

Quaker Hill in the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury, by, Rev. Warren H. Wilson of Brooklyn, 
New York. 

Hiram B. Jones and His School, by 
Rev. Edward L. Chichester of Quaker Hill, N. Y- 

Richard Osborn— A Reminiscence, 

by Margaret B. Monahau o£ Quaker Hill N. Y. 

Any one of these publications may be had by 
addressing the Secretary, 

Rev. Edward L. Chichester, 

Quaker Hill, N. Y. 

Price 1 Cents. 1 2 Cents Postpaid. 



Publish? 



■§*: V 

^ 



A TENABLE THEORY OF 
BIBLICAL INSPIRATION. 



The Christian doctrine of Biblical inspir- 
ation has had a curious history. When 
we first begin to catch glimpses of it in the 
early church, it had two elements. One 
was the element of experience. The feel- 
ing of inspiration was a common factor in 
the life of the church, as it has been in the 
life of every period when hearts beat high 
with religious emotion. The church knew 
what it meant to believe that a man was 
under the special guidance of God for a 
special purpose. Any wisdom, ability or 
emotional experience which seemed to 
them unusual was assigned directly, if it 
was used to assist in the development of 
the Christian church, to the influence of 
the Spirit of God. They understood quite 
well that this inspiration did not imply 
perfection, or any superiority in any mat- 
ter aside from the special gift concerned. 

The other factor of the doctrine was tra- 
dition. The Christian church inherited 
from Judaism a somewhat inchoate and 
5 



unformed doctrine of Sacred Scripture. 
This doctrine had taken shape in the cen- 
turies immediately preceding the Christian 
era, was somewhat mechanical and unnat- 
ural, and tended toward a theory of dicta- 
tion. It was the precursor of ideas about 
the Bible which we commonly call Talmu- 
dic, as, e. g., that God dictated to Moses 
the account of his own death and Moses 
wrote it weeping. These two inharmon- 
ious elements continued side by side in the 
thought of the church about the Bible, 
without criticism or examination, the ele- 
ment of tradition gradually gaining ground 
until the time of the Reformation. Then 
once more the experience of a free religious 
life led to emphasis on a free and natural 
interpretation of Biblical inspiration. But 
still beside it stood the irreconcilable tradi- 
tional element. The two appear together, 
with no recognition of their lack of har- 
mony, in the works of the reformers, as 
Luther and Calvin. Soon the more unnat- 
ural traditional theory of dictation once 
more gained ground. Where experience 
had been more prominent in Luther, tradi- 
tion became more prominent in Calvin. 
Calvin is said to have first called the Bible 
"the Word of God," — a phrase always be- 
fore reserved for the Divine truth in Scrip- 
6 



ture, rather than for the words of Scripture 
itself. The tendencies of the post-Refor- 
mation Protestant theology led to a con- 
stantly increasing emphasis on the tradi- 
tional factor of mechanical dictation, until 
at last that occupied almost the entire field; 
almost, but not quite; for the rich religious 
life that found expression in all the church- 
es frequently made inroads upon the me- 
chanical exactness of theological theory. 
Quite the most notable of these inroads in 
the English speaking world was that made 
by the Quaker theology. It constitutes a 
factor of importance in the growth of a 
more natural theory of inspiration. Per- 
haps of still more influence because depart- 
ing less widely from commonly received 
ideas, was the slight loosening which the 
mechanical theory received at the hands of 
the English Puritan theologians. And yet 
there was no such examination of the sub- 
ject as there was of most of the doctrines. 
Theology assumed its position, it did not 
reason it out; and even in its most me- 
chanical periods, there were always glimps- 
es of the other more living factor in the his- 
toric faith. The Protestant church comes 
to its present period with these two irre- 
concilable elements in its doctrine and no 
7 



classic age of clear thinking and distinct 
statement on the subject. 

There has providentially been preserved 
for the church of the present, with its at- 
tention to the facts of Biblical Literature, 
its study of the psychology of religious 
phenomena, its sympathy with God's var- 
ious revelations outside the Bible, the task 
of forming a doctrine of Biblical inspiration. 
This paper is simply the report of an ob- 
server on the conclusions to which the 
church seems to be coming in this task. 

Our discussion of this subject assumes 
two things: (i) the fact of revelation. 
This is not specifically Christian. Since 
religion is the personal relation of man to 
God, God must reveal himself to man in 
order that religion may exist at all. (2) 
The fact of Biblical inspiration — that God 
guided the writers of the Bible. Any dis- 
cussion which moves within the range of 
these two positions is upon historic, ortho- 
dox Christian ground. A theory of inspir- 
ation is an attempt to define the guidance 
of God in the production of the Bible and 
to state what it implies about the Bible it- 
self. 

Let us begin with the human end of our 
divine truth. Let us try to find out what 
inspiration means before we attempt to 



form a doctrine of Biblical inspiration. In- 
spiration is a personal term. It means the 
breathing in by one person of a power 
from another. It is, broadly speaking, 
another term for personal influence, and is 
usually kept for its higher, more uplifting 
phases. It is used properly within the 
realm of personality, of the personal touch 
of one individual upon another. When we 
use it of a literary product, it is a second- 
ary use. A sermon or a poem inspires me 
because of the man who is behind it. To 
use exact language, it is not the speech or 
the book which inspires me, but the preach- 
er or the poet. No more can we, when 
using exact language, say that a book is 
inspired. It may be the product of in- 
spired men. It may be wonderful in its 
power to carry that inspiration to others, 
but when the scholar comes to study in- 
spiration, he must press behind the book 
to the man. His theory of inspiration will 
concern itself with the psychology of a hu- 
man mind, and he will use the book simply 
as his glass by which to look into the 
man's own soul. Popularly we shall al- 
ways say that the Bible is inspired, as we 
say that the sun rises; but intelligent peo- 
ple will always interpret that to mean that 
the book is the expression of inspired men. 
9 



Inspiration in general, then, is the in- 
fluence of one person upon another. Di- 
vine inspiration is the influence of the di- 
vine person upon the human — of God upon 
man. When God so influences man as to 
make known to him in any way his will, 
or to lift him to any knowledge of himself, 
that knowledge is revelation. The problem 
of how he influences man is the problem 
of divine inspiration in general. It is a suf- 
ficiently difficult question. There are ele- 
ments of mystery in it. But it is no more 
difficult or mysterious than the problem of 
any other personal influence. How does 
your friend influence you? What is it 
which makes his relation to you an inspir- 
ation ? The ideals which you know he 
possesses appeal to you ; his affection and 
ambitions for you spur you on. God's 
ideal is his holiness; God's ambitions for 
man constitute man's duty. Altogether 
God's personality makes the same sort of 
an appeal to us, psychologically considered, 
that man's personality does. When we 
are speaking of God's influence we call the 
appeal that his personality makes to us in- 
spiration. 

It would be but a shallow and non-es- 
sential distinction to draw between the 

influence of man and God, that contact 
10 



with the one is visible and with the other 
invisible. Personality always expresses 
itself by symbols, and to the believer in the 
presence of God the world is as full of 
symbols of God, the expressions of his per- 
sonality, as is a populous city of the expres- 
sion of the personality of its inhabitants. 
We know one very much as we know the 
other. Both are matters of inference. We 
gather the character of a man from his 
works. We gather the character of God, 
in like manner, from his works. Therein 
is the difference between the thought that 
I am stating now and mysticism. Mysti- 
cism affirms that the soul may come into 
direct contact with God and gain direct 
knowledge of Him without the medium of 
expression. It makes faith what John 
Watson calls it, a sixth sense, which ap- 
proaches God without the instrumentality 
of the other senses. I fancy that to many 
people the term inspiration always means 
some such supernatural, or more properly, 
unnatural, contact with God. It suggests 
to them something which is miraculous in 
the barest, baldest sense, and it has no 
human parallel. A large proportion of the 
present doubt of inspiration takes its rise 
just here. "Inspiration," it says, "is a 

miraculous divine working upon the mind 
11 



of men. I see no evidence of any such ex- 
ceptional and miraculous divine working; 
therefore I do not believe in inspiration." 
The question then becomes one simply of 
the evidence for miracles; as such it was 
accepted and debated by Christian apolo- 
getics of the last century. The difficulty 
is that the definition is wrong. Much 
popular and some scholastic theology has 
tended directly to this view. So has a good 
deal of interpretation of the Bible, especially 
of prophecy and Pauline theology. 

Two things may be said regarding this 
mystical view of inspiration. 

i. There is no evidence for the possibil- 
ity of any different sort of knowledge of the 
divine mind from what one has of human 
minds. Psychology knows nothing of 
faith as a sixth sense. By whatever pro- 
cesses your mind knows your friend's 
mind, by those same processes it knows 
God's. Both exert influence by essential- 
ly the same means. 

2. It is not incumbent upon a theory of 
inspiration to solve the psychological prob- 
lem of personal relations. How one mind 
moulds another is not a question which 
theology needs to raise. It passes that 
whole matter over to the psychologist. 
Whether contact of mind with mind al- 
12 



ways needs means, it does not care. The- 
ology simply takes the fact of personal in- 
fluence, and calls the divine side of it in- 
spiration. 

This position takes the entire subject of 
inspiration out of the realm of the miracu- 
lous or the unusual. It places inspiration in 
the same category for explanation as the 
influence of parent over child, teacher over 
pupil, friend over friend. In the same cate- 
gory, I say, for explanation, but for power 
and value, there is no comparison. You 
can show your child by a little rivulet down 
a clay bank in the spring all the principles 
that operate in the geologic carving of the 
surface of a continent, but its little water- 
falls and tiny valleys never could teach one 
the majesty and rich beauty of Niagara or 
the Hudson in the Highlands. So the in- 
spiration of the Highest is the same in prin- 
ciple as the influence of one child over 
another as they play together in the gutter, 
but the last gives one no inkling of the 
depths of spiritual richness which the first 
brings to a human soul. On this judg- 
ment of value, not on any difference of 
psychological explanation, rests the 
uniqueness and sacredness of inspiration. 

This is inspiration in general. It belongs 
by right to every human soul. It is what 
13 



the older theologians, with their care for 
the uniqueness of Biblical inspiration, called 
enlightenment, keeping inspiration for 
God's guidance in the production of the Bi- 
ble. This distinction between enlighten- 
ment and inspiration seems not justified. 
The difference in value between the Bible 
and most other results of inspiration 
is admitted, but a difference in pro- 
duct does not necessitate an essential 
difference in the process of produc- 
tion. The difference may be incidental. 
Let me illustrate from natural science. 
To a geologist, a mountain structure 
means rock strata that have been fold- 
ed by earth movements. The weathering 
of ages may have reduced the surface to 
low hills or even to plains, but it is still 
mountain structure to the geologist. The 
Hudson River Valley, for example, lies 
across a range of mountain formation, 
while the Catskills, with their horizontal 
strata, are not true mountains, but only 
a carved plateau, with ravines cut by 
streams. For purposes of definition, every 
movement toward righteousness, every in- 
sight of truth, every impulse which in any 
way brings man nearer God is inspiration. 
It is the process of revelation. 
14 



The products of inspiration are many 
things beside Bibles. 

It induces actions even more often 
than words. There is no need to limit it 
to the emotional elements of life. God 
moves upon the hearts of men in other 
ways than the emotional. His modes of 
action are as wide as the field of human 
life. Friends are limited in influence. You 
have a friend who touches you upon the 
artistic side, but who has little other influ- 
ence over you; another, whose influence 
is great in solving practical business prob- 
lems, but to whom you never go for a 
judgment in the field of art; while yet an- 
other — some little child or childlike na- 
ture — winds his affections about your heart, 
but bears no influence in these other ways. 
But God is unlimited. He touches all sides 
of the soul. Man lives immersed in the at- 
mosphere of the Divine. There is no ave- 
nue of influence closed to God. He may use 
absolutely any factor of human life as the me- 
dium of inspiration, for all things may lift 
men Godward. If, then, such a definition 
of inspiration shall seem to any to be so 
wide as to be meaningless, I reply, it is 
wide, but not meaningless. The profundity 
of its meaning lies in its wideness; for the 
15 



influence of God touches every possibility 
of human action. 

I have dwelt upon this broad conception 
of inspiration, because its understanding is 
essential to the appreciation of Biblical in- 
spiration. Biblical inspiration is a species 
of inspiration in general. It is the influence 
of God which resulted in the production of 
the Bible. The Christian church has al- 
ways, however, desired to define and de- 
scribe it more closely than in this very gen- 
eral way. It has asked two questions, i. 
How does this influence differ in its opera- 
tion from God's influence for other matters ? 
2. What are the characteristics of the 
product of this influence which give it such 
a unique position in the world ? The last 
question lies in the field of revelation, but 
is always laid for answer upon the theory 
of inspiration. 

When one begins to inquire regarding 
the influence which produced a certain re- 
sult, the problem becomes inductive. Two 
questions are involved. The first is, what 
do we know from other sources about the 
usual action of this influence ? In our case 
this is the psychological problem of inspira- 
tion. Our answer is, in general, that the in- 
spiration of God works by the usual laws of 
personal influence. The second question 
16 



is the historical and literary problem, what 
does the Bible itself demand of inspiration ? 
A theory of Biblical inspiration must take 
its origin on this side from the facts of Bib- 
lical literature. What are the facts which 
we need to take into account ? 

The one great fact of Biblical literature 
looming above all others and dominating 
the whole field is the supreme and abso- 
lutely unique value of Scripture for relig- 
ious life. Other books have spiritual value. 
Through them also God has been leading 
men to himself. It will not do for us to 
arrogate to the Christian religion all the 
immanence of God in the spiritual world. 
We must learn something of the tolerance 
of that Ceylon missionary who said, 
"There are a great many heathen whom I 
expect to find in heaven, or else a very 
good reason why they are not there." But 
acknowledging with the utmost liberality 
which the facts will allow the value of 
extra-Christian movements for right, it still 
remains true that the Bible stands supreme 
as the influence for good in the world, 
stands so supreme that there is nothing 
with which it can be compared. It con- 
tains the best revelation of God the world 
has ever seen. One says this, not as a 
Christian, but as a student of religious his- 
17 



tory. It is this fact, which we can state so 
simply in a dozen words, which gives to 
the Bible its superlative interest. It is the 
greatest cause of the world's best relig- 
ious progress. It brings the individual 
nearer God than any other book we can 
find. This makes reverence for the Bible 
the natural attitude of the Christian, and 
irreverent study a repulsive spiritual mon- 
strosity. The Bible is holy ground, be- 
cause, like the burning bush, God is pecu- 
liarly there. 

It is not surprising that the Christian 
church has often held this feeling of rever- 
ence so strongly that it has looked with 
disapproval on any attempt to make the 
slightest scholastic investigation of the Bi- 
ble. It would have been unnatural had it 
been otherwise. Moreover, this guarding 
of sacred things is, in certain even some- 
what advanced stages of intellectual prog- 
ress, an element of safety, like bodily pain. 
It prevents dangerous experiments. Later 
stages of progress see that investigation and 
reverence are not incompatible. Investiga- 
tion of sacred things without reverence is 
always sacrilege. 

The primal Biblical fact, then, upon which 
a theory of inspiration is to be built, is the 
unique religious value of the Bible. The 
18 



Bible is inspired for spiritual truth, not for 
artistic or philosophical or historical truth. 
Implicitly, if not explicitly, there must lie 
in any theory of inspiration some explana- 
tion for the spiritual richness of the Bible. 
There are four different possible explana- 
tions: 

i. A book may be of unique spiritual 
value because of a supernatural dictation 
of spiritual truth to its authors. This 
unnatural theory has now and then found 
partial lodgment in Christian thought, but 
I think less often than many suppose. 
Even the most conservative do not hold it 
now, in spite of occasional expressions 
which might be easily thus construed. 

2. A book may be the result of certain 
supernatural and unique religious experi- 
ences of its authors. This has been a not 
unusual assumption about the Bible. It ap- 
pears very early in the history of the doc- 
trine of inspiration. Beyond doubt the 
Hebrew prophet regarded himself as at 
least sometimes, not always, under the di- 
rect control of the Spirit of God. On this 
belief he based his splendid confidence. 
But he was not alone. Multitudes of other 
men in early religions shared with him his 
neglect of second causes and regarded their 
strong emotions as God-given. So far as 
19 



emotional experience goes, it would be very 
difficult to draw the line between the first 
vision of Isaiah and the first vision of Mu- 
hammad, or between the enlightenment of 
Buddha and the conversion of Saul. The 
difference in the religious value of the re- 
sult is immeasurable. Outside of the proph- 
ets there is no class of writers of the Bible 
who make any claim for themselves of a 
special or unique religious experience. 
Theology has often made the claim for 
them. Philo, whose ideas of inspiration 
are derived more from the Greek oracle 
than from the Hebrew prophet, regarded 
the experience of the Biblical writers as 
necessarily miraculous. New Testament 
thought returned to a feeling of spiritual 
guidance akin to that of the prophets, but 
regarded that experience as by no means 
limited to the writing of the Scripture, since 
this gift of the Spirit was possible to all in the 
Christian church, and was possessed by ma- 
ny. Later theology has unconsciously built 
more on the unnatural Philonic dogma than 
on the living prophetic experience. As 
the conceptions of inspiration became more 
mechanical and the book rather than the 
man was emphasized, it^became easier to 
magnify the miraculous in the experi- 
ences of the Biblical writers, to place them 

20 



together in a class and to isolate them from 
the rest of mankind. The Bible gives no 
warrant for any such operation. It is im- 
possible to make positive statements about 
so personal a matter as emotional experi- 
ence, but there seems to be no ground in 
Scripture for affirming that the Biblical 
writers had any experiences which belonged 
to them as a class apart from other men. 
Their inspiration does not rest in that. 

3. A book may be the result of religious 
experiences, not supernatural in the com- 
mon sense, but unusual, and expressed 
with unusual skill and force. This is what 
might be called religious genius, as we 
speak of poetic and artistic genius. Some 
one complained to Turner that he had 
never seen such sunsets as Turner painted, 
when the reply came, " Don't you wish 
you could?" Isaiah saw the holiness of 
God as no one else did, then he painted it 
for others to see. Thus also did Hosea for 
the love of God, and Paul for liberty in 
Christ, and the author of Daniel for the be- 
lief that right would triumph at last, and 
the author of Job for faith that the hard 
problems of life may be trusted with God. 
Of course there are degrees of this religious 
genius. I do not know that Haggai had 
any great view of religious truth, or of any 
21 



thing else except that the temple ought to 
be built; and he got it built, and the little 
book called by his name stands to this day 
as the comfort of all common-place men 
who desire to do some plain practical 
thing in the name of God. But on the 
whole the Bible is the product of men who 
were discoverers of spiritual truth. Those 
truths can never be discovered again. The 
Bible stands in relation to them as Socrates 
and Plato stand to Philosophy. No other 
man can lead or needs to lead the race over 
the road that they have broken. Consider 
what fundamental truths these are: The 
unity of God; His holiness; His love; the 
sinfulness of sin; God's forgiveness; relig- 
ion as personal and not tribal; the ap- 
proach to God as moral and not ceremoni- 
al. All Biblical writers did not know all 
these truths. Their personal views were 
imperfect. Some of these discoveries have 
been made by other men. Buddha made 
some, the Hindu philosophers some, but 
they hardly saw them so clearly as did 
the writers of the Bible, nor were they able 
to make them so efficient in history ; and 
after all, efficiency is the ultimate test of the 
value of religious genius as it is of every- 
thing else. These beginnings of religious 
conceptions can never be repeated for the 



race any more than the steam engine can be 
rediscovered. The Bible can never be du- 
plicated. Its value must always stand 
unique. 

But, while these experiences are not su- 
pernatural and are unique only in the sense 
that they make discoveries which can never 
be repeated for the world at large, what of 
the skill and force with which they are ex- 
pressed ? Is this unique ? Can we ex- 
pect that another book may supercede the 
Bible, not indeed in historic position in the 
growth of religion, but in the skillful expres- 
sions of spiritual truth ? 

On this point again there is a difference. 
Not all the Bible is expressed with equal 
skill. One may well suppose that no writ- 
ing will ever win its way to the popular 
heart as an expression of trust in God like 
that little Hebrew song beginning "The 
Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." 
Perhaps the ethical demand can never be 
put more succinctly than in Micah's words, 
M What doth Jehovah require of thee but 
to do justly and to love mercy and to walk 
humbly with thy God?" Other elements 
are not so beautifully expressed ; but on 
the whole, no body of religious literature 
is so skillfully put as the Bible. 

It would not be impossible that it might 



be superceded. Inspiration does not guar- 
antee the absolute superiority of its expres- 
sion ; but we may rest with fair compla- 
cency. The Bible is the residuum of a 
thousand years of literature. The world 
cannot supercede it in a day. The matter 
of present interest is that the Bible is the 
product of great religious genius both in 
experience and expression. 

4. A book may be of unique religious 
value because, aside from any experience of 
its authors, it contains a record of unpar- 
alleled religious worth. That the Bible 
stands in this position the church has al- 
ways seen. It is a very shallow fear which 
one sometimes hears expressed now, that 
the modern study of the Bible will so low- 
er its value that any good book may take 
its place in popular estimate. Laying aside 
what was said under the last head, it re- 
mains true that the Bible can never be re- 
placed until some history has been pro- 
duced that shall reveal God more clearly 
than the history of Israel and of the first 
Christian century. A better book than the 
Bible cannot be written until a better life 
than that of Christ has been lived. 

But, men ask, if this be the ground of 
the supremacy of the Bible, what basis for 
a theory of inspiration at all ? This ques- 

24 



tion was made the ground of a sharp discus- 
sion through all the period of the post- 
Reformation dogmatic theology. There 
were portions of the Bible, some claimed, 
which needed no inspiration. Luke could 
have gathered his information from the 
sources which he tells us he used without 
any help from inspiration. The answer 
which the church gave was usually from 
the point of view of inerrancy ; that Luke 
needed inspiration to keep him from histor- 
ical errors. If inspiration be a supernatural 
divine aid, the question is quite pertinent 
and the answer correct. If inspiration be 
personal influence, the question is mean- 
ingless. God guided Luke no less than 
Isaiah, or any other of his servants. God 
guided Barnabas to be a "son of consola- 
tion " and Luke to be an historian, and one 
was as much inspired as the other ; only 
Barnabas' was not Biblical inspiration, for 
it did not produce part of the Bible, and 
Luke's was. The difference is one of re- 
sult, not of content. 

The religious value of the Bible, then, 
rests not on the supernatural dictation of 
its contents or the miraculous experiences of 
its authors, but partly on the religious gen- 
ius of the writers, — their clear religious in- 
sight and skillful expression — and partly on 
25 



the unique religious value of the course 
of history which the Bible presents. In 
both aspects inspiration is the divine influ- 
ence which led men to write their experi- 
ences or their knowledge. 

Does the unique spiritual value of the 
Bible demand a corresponding unique lit- 
erary, historical and moral value ? In the 
matter of literary value, the church has long 
answered, No. There was a time when 
some theologians regarded the literary 
structure of the Bible as perfect, even to 
questions of linguistic purity. Was it con- 
ceivable, they asked, that the Holy Spirit 
should write bad Greek ? But the 
church as a whole never took that posi- 
tion and all Biblical scholarship has long 
since departed from it. We do not now 
demand that either the language or the 
literary structure of a book should be per- 
fect because it is in the Bible. It is true 
that the Bible contains magnificent litera- 
ture. It may be doubted whether there are 
more eloquent orations than certain of 
Isaiah's sermons, or more perfect moral 
stories than Christ's parables, or finer war- 
songs than Deborah's Ode, or more tender 
elegies than the dirge of David over Saul, 
or simpler and more delightful historical 
narratives than certain in the Hebrew his- 
36 



tories, or a problem-poem more profound 
or more skilfully arranged than the book of 
Job. But why continue this list ? Some 
of the Bible is among the best of its class 
in all literature. The whole world of Bib- 
lical scholarship, however, recognizes that 
not all of the Bible reaches this high stand- 
ard. Not all its oratory is equally majestic 
nor all its poetry equally poetical. Literary 
perfection cannot be claimed for all of the 
Bible. There is a better claim that can be 
made. 

With regard to historical perfection, 
however, one cannot speak so positively of 
a universally accepted position. This is the 
question of the inerrancy of the Bible. It 
has been complicated in popular discussion 
by being mingled with irrelevant questions. 
Let us isolate it. It has two sides. One is 
the question of logic, which I have already 
asked : Does the unique spiritual value of 
the Bible demand inerrancy ? The other is 
the question of fact, Is the history in the 
Bible inerrant ? 

Why should the spiritual value of the Bible 
demand historical perfection any more than 
it does literary perfection ? When a proph- 
et told a story from Israel's ancient time, 
the lesson he had in mind by no means de- 
pended on the question of the accuracy of 
27 



detail in the story. In fact, the claim for 
historical inerrancy was never made as an 
inference from the spiritual value. It had 
two elements : i, the belief that God had 
dictated the contents of the Bible and there- 
fore it must be perfect ; 2, an exaggerated 
estimate of the value of the history narrated 
in the Bible, placing the emphasis of the 
Bible on the intellectual rather than on the 
spiritual side. 

The facts of Biblical literature do not 
warrant a belief in its inerrancy. To the 
best and most careful scholarship there 
seems to be a certain small amount of 
error in Biblical history. There is proba- 
bly an element of developing legend, where 
the stories are beginning to take on the ro- 
seate color which all popular tales so easily 
acquire. There is certainly an element of 
tradition in the stories of Hebrew antiquity, 
some of which are variant versions of well- 
known Semetic legends. Bible history 
seems to run the whole gamut from simple 
and accurate narrative to pure legend with 
a mythical basis ; but all of this — history, 
tradition, legend — is woven together into a 
literary complex whose sole purpose is to 
teach religious truths. These truths are 
what lift men to God. To find them, one 
needs no great scholarship or critical acu- 
28 



men. They are the important things. And 
so we come back once more to the point 
from which we started — the Bible is in- 
spired for spiritual truth. 

Now if this be so, we have fixed on one 
side the limits of our theory of inspiration. 
It will not concern itself with questions of 
the historical, literary or scientific perfec- 
tion of the Bible. It is utterly indifferent 
to these problems. The problem of inspi- 
ration is not in the least affected by the 
question of whether Genesis contains good 
science or Chronicles contains good his- 
tory. It loses nothing if they do not, it 
would gain nothing if they did. It con- 
cerns itself simply and solely with the spir- 
itual value of the Bible. 

The question of inerrancy involves one 
other related matter : Does the unique re- 
ligious value of the Bible insure the perfec- 
tion of all its parts in moral and religious 
teaching ? Here again the Bible is a com- 
plex, not a unity, and parts of it come from 
men whose religious and moral concep- 
tions were crude. Here again there are the 
two questions of logic and fact. Does the 
idea of inspiration itself make this demand 
for religious perfection in all parts? One 
answers, if inspiration be influence and not 
miraculous dictation, no. God in history 
29 



guides the world religiously by men whose 
religious concepts are imperfect. There is 
no logical demand that a book, the product 
of these imperfect men, should be perfect. 

The question of fact has to do with three 
divisions of the subject, i. Moral teach- 
ing. Here all the church has long been 
agreed. When, for example, a Hebrew 
poet, moved by a natural hatred of Baby- 
lonia and expressing himself in terms of 
ancient and barbaric warfare, wrote, 
<; Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth 
thy little ones against the rock," common 
Christian good sense has long recognized 
that ancient ethical standards constitute no 
ideals for the present. Laws of divorce 
and slavery have been judged by the same 
rule. If in some other cases, like the mas- 
sacre of the Canaanites, there has some- 
times been an attempt to justify barbarities, 
it has been because the action was sup- 
posed to result from a direct command of 
God, who is the same yesterday, today and 
forever. On the whole, the imperfection 
of the moral standards of some parts of the 
Bible has not been much of a stumbling 
block. 

2. Theological opinion. There has 
been more inclination to hold this with 
strictness, yet even here the principle of 
30 



the growth of revelation has long been ad- 
mitted for the Old Testament. The popu- 
lar tendency has naturally been to regard 
the New Testament theology as perfect. 
The facts show that we are not to assume 
absolute perfection of theological opinion 
on the part of all New Testament writers. 
In some few cases there were opinions con- 
trary to fact. The whole New Testament 
church held, and the New Testament writ- 
ers confidently proclaimed, the speedy re- 
turn of the Messiah. We recall how many 
times they urge to Christian activity be- 
cause " the day is at hand." More often 
their theological opinion was as yet un- 
formed. To attempt to draw a full-fledged 
speculative theology with philosophical 
distinctions which no Jew ever dreamed of 
making, out of the plain practical urging 
to Christian duty found in Paul's epistles, 
has been a practice whose error the more 
recent closer study of the Bible has made it 
easy for any man to point out. Probably 
the revolt from this practice makes Ritsch- 
lianism, conscious or unconscious, the great 
influence that it is today, especially among 
the younger scholars in both Germany and 
America, for Ritschlianism distinguishes 
sharply between theology and religion. 
Yet there are elements properly called 
31 



theological in which the Bible teaching, 
when taken as a whole, is as near perfec- 
tion as human opinion will ever reach. 
The central subject of theology is the na- 
ture of God. The Bible teaching is that 
God is a person. Now the term person 
may be a very inadequate expression of the 
essence of God, but it is the highest ex- 
pression that mankind can ever reach. It 
is the ultimate. There is nothing beyond. 
In this sense the Bible is perfect. But that 
does not argue perfection in all the minor 
details of theological opinion. 

3. Religious expression. Religion is 
the relation of man to God. Here, also, 
the Bible presents a growth, rather than a 
dead level from beginning to end. This 
growth is of surpassing importance, for it 
lies chiefly along the lines of greatest Old 
Testament interest, the prophetic activity. 
We insist much in these days upon the 
prophets as moral and social reformers. So 
they were. Perhaps their activity had us- 
ually that motive as its occasion. But it 
led them directly into the subject of the re- 
lation of man to God. That it did this con- 
stituted the peculiar mark of their religious 
genius. They saw that religion was not a 
tribal but a moral relation. That led some 
of them to see — Ezekiel puts it most 



clearly — that it was a personal relation. 
No step in the history of religion had ever 
been taken which was so great as that. 
But this new and lofty conception gained 
its consummation and efficient power only 
in the person of Christ. In the New Tes- 
tament it is no longer argued, but assumed. 
The great addition of the New Testament 
is an idea already foreshadowed in the Old, 
that the perfect personal relation is the re- 
lation of love. Love in the New Testa- 
ment sense is absolute harmony of will be- 
tween man and God. So long as distinc- 
tion of personality between man and God 
is kept, there can be no relation more 
close. In this sense Christianity is the 
perfect religion. It has reached a point be- 
yond which the approach of man to God 
can never progress. The Bible speaks the 
last word regarding the relation of man to 
God ; but it does not speak that last word 
in all its parts. It teaches perfection, but it 
is not all perfect. 

On no one of the subjects connected with 
moral and religious teaching, then, is the 
Bible inerrant in all its parts. There is a 
use of the word perfect, however, which 
is correctly applied to the Bible. In the 
sense of religious supremacy in which the 
great creeds themselves use the term, we 
33 



may say that the Bible is a perfect and in- 
fallible rule of faith and practice. 

One further subject demands brief atten- 
tion. A theory of inspiration as divine in- 
fluence must interpret the word " authors " 
in a very wide sense. Modern Bible study 
compels this. In fact, there is no one word 
broad enough to cover all those upon whom 
this divine influence was exercised. The 
construction of the Bible is seen to be im- 
mensely more complex than was formerly 
supposed. Authors and editors, those who 
wrote appendices and those who culled 
material, must all be included under the 
conception of inspiration. There are two 
stories of the founding of the kingdom un- 
der Saul. Inspiration must take account of 
the authors of both and also of the editor 
who combined the accounts. The Book of 
Psalms must represent, in its writing and 
arrangement, the work of a large number 
of men. All of them were doing what they 
could to make the temple praises of Jeho- 
vah more worthy of his Majesty. Must 
we not ascribe inspiration to all of them ? 
Was not the author of that unknown 
source which the editor of the Gospel of 
Luke used for his account of the Perean 
ministry, which contains perhaps the ten- 
derest and richest teaching of all the words 
34 



of Christ which have come to us, inspired 
quite as much as was the editor of Luke ? 
There is no arbitrary line to be drawn. To 
everyone who had to do with making the 
Bible what it is must be ascribed that in- 
fluence of God which we call inspiration. 

I have tried in this brief sketch to show 
that Biblical inspiration is divine influence 
directed toward a particular end ; that it is 
not psychologically different from divine 
influence directed toward other ends ; that 
the great characteristic of its product is the 
uniqueness and perfection of the religious 
thought in which the Bible culminates ; 
that in no respect does inspiration insure 
perfection in all parts of the Bible, and that 
it must be ascribed to all whose labor en- 
tered into the production of the Bible. This 
sketch aims to outline nothing novel or un- 
known, but to interpret and express what 
I conceive to be the common conceptions 
of modern theological and Biblical scholar- 
ship on this subject. 

The difference between what is often call- 
ed the older theory and a theory tenable in 
the light of modern study is mainly in the 
following points: 

i . The old theory emphasized the inspir- 
ation of books; the new emphasizes the 
inspiration of men. 

2. The old regarded the process of in- 
35 



spiration as different from other human ex- 
perience. The new regards it as of the 
same sort as ordinary human experience. 
In the terms of the history with which this 
paper began, the old emphasized the ele- 
ment of divine dictation, which has come 
down uncritically from scribal Judaism. 
The new rejects that altogether, and builds 
only on the element of experience. 

3. The old regards the product of in- 
spiration as being in all parts perfect in 
historical and theological statement, but 
not necessarily in literary form or in ethical 
teaching. The new does not regard in- 
spiration as guaranteeing perfection of all 
parts in any of these particulars. 

4. The primal cause of all difference is 
that the old was constructed on the basis 
of a deductive inference from the perfection 
of God. The new is built on the basis of 
inductive reasoning from the facts of the 
Bible and of life. 

To make a definition is always rash, but 
the following definition may be suggested, 
recognizing, however, that it is tentative 
and not final: Biblical inspiration is the 
personal influence of God which so guided 
all who took part in producing the Bible 
that they made a body of literature unique 
in religious value, and, so far as we now 
see, final in religious teaching. 
36 



i J908 



